The Open vRAN movement started with some smaller waves and the anticipation of a larger wave to form. It was driven by a belief that the fundamental way that mobile networks have been built for decades needed to evolve and improve. Legacy architectures, that were useful in the past, have outlived their utility and are holding operators back. Changes are required to enable new services, new operational models, and fundamentally better economics. Operators started asking about it, organizations were formed to investigate it, and key innovators are now executing on it.

We formed and announced Open vRAN at Mobile World Congress 2018. Conversations with key network operator customers, as well as our partners, made it apparent that something needed to change and they thought we could help. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind ride – working with customers to better define this future and the key elements, building solutions with our partners, innovating in the market to explore new service designs, and contributing to the process of defining industry specifications.

On that last topic, sometimes there is a little confusion between Open vRAN and O-RAN due to the similar names and similar principles. The naming similarity was coincidental, but not surprising, given both are fairly descriptive of the opportunity. O-RAN describes themselves well on their website, “The O-RAN Alliance was founded by operators to clearly define requirements and help build a supply chain eco-system to realize its objectives.” They have extensive details available on their website and in their whitepaper, so I won’t speak for them here.

Much of this was defined over the past year and we’re very pleased that our own Open vRAN ecosystem is very well aligned with their key principles and objectives. That should be expected since we were listening to many of the very same operators that formed O-RAN when we designed the Open vRAN Ecosystem, and many of our members are also active members of O-RAN. In fact, Cisco and other key partners contributed heavily to specifications in xRAN, which has since merged into O-RAN.

So, what’s the difference? In a nutshell, O-RAN, in their words, is focused on defining requirements to help build a supply chain eco-system, and Open vRAN has built a supply chain ecosystem to help accelerate and deliver on those solutions. Our ecosystem partners work together – participating in the process of opening up the RAN and accelerating its transition to a more flexible architecture, while building solutions to help customers realize new opportunities.

BIG things are happening in Open vRAN and we can’t wait to tell you more about them. We’ll publish a more thorough update in a few days as we kickoff Mobile World Congress – Barcelona. Make sure you plan to come visit us in our booth in Hall 3, 3E30 – you won’t be disappointed.

The Open vRAN wave is building – winds are blowing in the right direction, and friction is reducing as the industry moves forward. Come along – the water is nice, and we would love to have you join us – there’s a beautiful wave on the horizon.

2019 is going to be an incredible year in wireless networking. Enterprises are going to be able to take advantage of several important innovations.

First, 5G carrier-based wireless is going to start rolling out broadly, bringing a promise of dramatically better performance to mobile workers and the enterprise. Additionally, standards-based Wi-Fi 6 will be available in 2019. Wi-Fi 6 will dramatically improve the wireless experience, and it will enable new use cases for wireless that weren’t possible before. Quick on the heels of both of these rollouts will be CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service, also known as OnGo), an extension of LTE that offers a new band of uncrowded spectrum. It will be especially valuable for mission-critical IoT applications.

With so much changing in how we connect, we are looking at a rare opportunity to combine technological change with strategic planning, as we explore how new wireless capabilities will change the way our businesses operate.

Common Tech

Before we get into the changes we’ll see in network planning due to these technologies, we have to understand how they’re different — and how they are actually coming together.

In 2019, both carrier-based mobile connectivity (LTE and 5G cellular) and unlicensed nomadic networking (Wi-Fi 6, otherwise known as 802.11ax), will converge in two key areas: radio signal encoding, and scheduling.

Both new wireless systems use the same method to squeeze more users and data into the frequencies they use, so each base station or access point can talk to more devices simultaneously. Also, with Wi-Fi 6, local wireless networking gets more scheduled, deterministic use of spectrum. Unlike other versions of Wi-Fi, which use a randomized channel access mechanism, with Wi-Fi 6, a device can rely on being able to use the radio on a particular schedule (measured by the millisecond). Scheduled access enables lower latency and allows for greater density of devices. And it has a positive impact on power use and battery longevity. In this regard Wi-Fi is advancing alongside 3GPP cellular technologies (like 5G and LTE), which are also deterministic.

Despite their technological convergence, carrier-based (LTE/5G) and unlicensed (Wi-Fi) wireless systems are, and will remain, dramatically different in terms of cost, infrastructure layout, and the level of administrative control they provide to enterprise network operators. These factors will determine how enterprises plan to maintain and grow their wireless capabilities.

Wireless Inside the Campus and the Branch

Wi-Fi 6 provides improvements in speed and latency, and supports a higher density of connected devices. Combined with its reasonable cost to deploy and maintain, it will prove an ideal system for indoor wireless connectivity – especially in areas where access points will serve more users.

Users on Wi-Fi 6 devices will see improved individual experiences. People in crowded areas that have traditionally offered hit-or-miss performance (waiting rooms, student lecture halls, meeting spaces, and so on), will have better experiences. Some devices that previously would only be connected by wired Ethernet will be able to move to wireless. This will help drive innovation around high-bandwidth and latency-sensitive use cases that should really be untethered, like AR/VR, gaming, and video communications.

As the number of performance-sensitive wireless devices goes up, enterprises will need new network intelligence to assure the best levels of service. Specifically, Cisco believes that Wi-Fi 6 access points, and end devices themselves, must become sensors, collecting real-time performance and experience data that they stream to a new generation of analytic engines. This will allow for proactive and granular management of these increasingly complex environments.

While for some enterprise installations and indoor use cases it will make sense to extend 5G or LTE into the interior space with Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS), or with interior 5G access points (“microcells”), this remains an expensive proposition. LTE and 5G radio chipsets are dramatically more expensive than Wi-Fi, and we do not anticipate this changing. Additionally, most enterprises have an exponentially increasing number of devices they need to keep online; paying a monthly fee for connectivity per device would be cost-prohibitive.

Wi-Fi networks also provide a rich vein of analytics information to the enterprise. Businesses can gather extremely rich data about their facilities by tracking how Wi-Fi devices move through them. This information is going to change how businesses optimize the use of their physical locations.

5G for Connecting Campus and Branch

5G will have a great impact on branches and campuses as a backhaul service. Keeping an enterprise’s branch and campus locations all connected to each other and the Internet has traditionally fallen to wired technologies like T1/E1 and xDSL; today, 4G is often used to quickly bring up sites, or as a back-up link, but it’s seldom used as a primary link, due to bandwidth limitations and cost.

But 5G is much faster than 4G. It can be used to augment or, in some scenarios, replace a wired connection. And with contemporary SD-WAN tools, it’s simple to deploy 5G in parallel with other WAN services – even across thousands of sites.

Moreover, wireless links make sense for businesses that rely on having robust, always-on connectivity to their branch offices, and for businesses that rely on cloud services. That is to say: nearly all businesses. Wireless backhaul links can’t be cut, and wireless infrastructure is often the first communications service restored after a disaster like a major storm. Using 5G to augment existing WAN services allows sites to have maximum uptime for their cloud-based services, and, when it’s managed with SD-WAN and used alongside links that are bandwidth-constrained , it can enhance the overall application experience too.

For even more bandwidth, 5G has frequency extensions into high-frequency millimeter wave bands, which offer significantly higher throughput. These high-frequency bands do not easily reach indoor spaces, but carriers can quickly set up external, line-of-site antennas to provide dedicated, high-speed connectivity at competitive prices.

Wireless and IoT

Both Wi-Fi 6 and 5G offer exciting opportunities to connect more devices reliably via wireless. They share scheduling technology that makes wireless more deterministic, which is important for mission-critical IoT assets being used in manufacturing automation, healthcare, energy, and many other industries. Wireless technologies enable new use cases, and businesses that lean heavily on wireless will find it easier to accelerate their digitization initiatives.

Wi-Fi 6 APs will also increasingly include additional radios, like Bluetooth and Zigbee, which will make them more capable IoT gateways — and useful wireless sensors. They’ll be to help track and manage IoT devices through their entire lifecycle.

A particularly interesting extension of LTE (and later, 5G), called CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service), holds a lot of promise as a complimentary technology to Wi-Fi 6 for use inside buildings. CBRS relies on spectrum in the 3.5Ghz range that is not used by WiFi or existing LTE/5G services in the U.S., so it’s unlikely to be interfered with by general-access consumer devices. Some initial CBRS capabilities are rolling out in products shortly. For devices, like robots, that need guaranteed connectivity as well as mobility, CBRS will be a great compliment to W-Fi 6. Most businesses using CBRS will use it together with Wi-Fi 6.

When we discuss mission-critical IoT programs, we also need to keep security top of mind. Many IoT devices are both highly critical to business, and highly vulnerable to attack. Fortunately, a modern network can help make an IoT-rich environment more secure in several ways. In particular, it can limit potential for malware to spread from device to device, by using software-defined segmentation to ensure that network traffic from a particular device cannot be sent where it’s not supposed to be. Segmentation policies can span wired and wireless networks, as well as ruggedized environments.

Tying Wireless Networks Together

5G and Wifi6 will eventually be deployed together in the enterprise. It will be an evolving challenge to manage these separate access technologies as integrated systems – with unified policy, security, and analytics. Users and devices will need to move between 5G and Wi-Fi 6 systems, and the smart IT leader will want the experience to be seamless and easy to manage at scale. Orchestrating the management systems of these separate networks is our next frontier. Watch out for more to come on this aspect.

Today, Cisco CTAO, announces an important milestone to deploy an open-source version of Cisco’s Hybrid Information-Centric Networking (hICN), which is a unique network architecture based on the Internet protocol that rethinks communications around information itself and not on the location of the data. IP packets are routed in the network based on location-independent names (what you look for) and not on location addresses (where the data you look for is stored).

In 5G heterogeneous networks, and especially in hybrid Enterprise/Service Provider environments, hICN holds tremendous potential to simplify mobility, low-latency edge caching and processing because of an effective multi-point to multi-point transport tailored to application-specific requirements. In effect, it facilitates accessibility to test and build applications on top of the network, providing competitive advantages for developers, users, and Cisco.

Cisco’s hICN is adapted and synonymously named after the new Open Source project created in the Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) under the Fast Data (FD.io) umbrella of innovating data plane technologies.

The Progress of hICN

This new generation of hICN is the result of two years of engineering development at Cisco and is the first high-performance and easy to deploy ICN solution over the Internet. In recent trials, Cisco and Verizon demonstrated the feasibility and potential benefits of Hybrid ICN in Verizon’s labs, applying hICN to live video distribution over a mobile and multi-homed access network.

Cisco’s focus on Information-Centric Networking is not new and has grown when the company acquired ICN technology from Xerox’s PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and created an Open Source project in 2017 named Community ICN, aiming at an initial assessment of ICN potential.

According to Giovanna Carofiglio, Cisco Distinguished Engineer and leader of ICN program, “moving ICN out of innovation labs and making it ready for integration in IP network, hICN introduces a disruptive location-independent network transport, that goes way beyond the TCP protocol by embracing named-based communication transport and packet processing using IPv6. The implications are significant: native anchorless mobility, multi-path, multi-homing, multi-cast as well as many-to-many communications with built-in content security and better scaling with information flows rather than end-hosts transactions. hICN improves the user experience for both long format content as well as live, real-time communications and live streaming.”

How It Works

hICN builds upon VPP and provides a high-performance host-stack as well as an end-client stack for any desktop and mobile OS (Windows, iOS, macOS, Android, Linux). This makes it immediately available to customers who want to develop a service using hICN. new hICN advances open up the network and makes it easier for developers for test and develop multiple applications, which results in competitive advantages for Cisco, developers, and users.

“The hICN FD.io project exploits the tremendous power and feature richness given by its core technology: VPP (Vector Packet Processing), which is already part of several Cisco products and used by an ever-increasing number of partners and customers,” says David Ward, Cisco’s CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect.

In a different context, hICN can benefit Cloud-native environments by delivering more scalable, secure and flexible transport services than what TCP can provide today. This is why the Open Source hICN solution already supports application level protocols for the Web and Cloud Computing to transport multi-party and real-time communications.

These are just a few examples of use cases where we see hICN as a significant bridge to the possible. We’ll showcase hICN along with a series of demos on Open Source and Fast Data projects just outside the main Cisco booth at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Feb. 25-28.

Drop me a line or drop by our station in Barcelona to learn more about this breakthrough development, and let’s advance this technology together. Hope to see you there!

All eyes are on Lisbon, Portugal starting today, and not just because Chinese President Xi Jinping is visiting. This week’s LightReading 2020 Vision Executive Summit brings together some of the industry’s greatest minds to tackle telecom’s toughest problems. This is certainly relevant as we look ahead over the next few months toward Cisco Live and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and focus on how to help Service Providers around the world save money, make money and reduce risk.

Since the inaugural 2020 Vision Executive Summit in Iceland four years ago, the communications industry has experienced the early stages of what is going to be a tough but ultimately rewarding transformation. There’s plenty of excitement around the potential of 5G, AI, virtualization and other transformative trends, but it’s certainly not all rainbows and roses — and we all know it.

A heavy dose of reality has set in as the day-to-day business and operational disruption hits home, caused by increasing competition, regulatory and political uncertainty, and unparalleled cybersecurity threats.

These key issues will be front and center at this year’s 2020 Vision Executive Summit in Lisbon, December 4-6, where the expert team of Heavy Reading analysts and Light Reading editors are bringing together industry leaders to discuss these pressing topics and answer questions.

Cisco will be speaking at two keynote presentations at the event: one from SVP/GM Service Provider Network Systems Sumeet Arora discussing the network of the future; and one from EMEAR Service Provider CTO Brian Meaney hitting security issues head on. In addition, you can find Cisco on panels tackling questions about The Edge – where is it and who will own it? And about 5G – where are we now, and what are the roadblocks?

Cisco has been involved in 5G proofs of concept for some time. We know that 5G will demand a lot more from data center infrastructure. The technology requires even lower latency and higher throughputs, the ability to scale quickly, as well as support for multitenancy, virtual machine and container workloads, and policy-driven configuration. The telemetry and security will have to be 5G-ready, too.

Mobile service providers will need more flexibility in their data centers to handle the new services that 5G will enable. Each service will have to be properly provisioned and configured with the right service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure an excellent customer experience. Technologies that enable 5G core flexibility, like network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN), will be key to succeeding with 5G.

The Cisco Data Center SDN with ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) is ideal for mobile service providers which are planning to hit the ground running on 5G. This solution helps to enable secure, high-performance and scalable data centers across any geographical location. Cisco ACI features NFV, intent-based networking, and support for newer architectures, as well as telemetry, service chaining, and security.

The service chaining feature in Cisco ACI helps service providers deliver services more quickly by bringing physical bare-metal servers together with virtual machines or containers to support different service types. Besides this, the Cisco Data Center SDN extends policy and automation to multiple distributed telco-edge clouds through Cisco ACI for 5G readiness. Distributed edge clouds would be fundamental platforms for service providers to support new service and applications, opening up new vertical market opportunities along with 5G architecture.

Cisco customer Reliance Jio is well positioned to gain an edge with 5G thanks to the Cisco Data Center SDN-ACI platform. The service provider has been able to deliver new services very quickly with a Cisco-powered, 5G-ready all-IP network. The service provider on-boarded 160 million 4G subscribers in just 18 months and will have scaled to more than 250 thousand Cisco routers by end-2018.

The race to 5G is intensifying as exemplified by a number of public announcements made by leading mobile operators. However, deeper conversations with service providers yield a very simple but important question. How will we make the investments in 5G upgrades profitable? The bet is that 5G technology will support massively scalable, low-latency-enabled applications that in turn will open up new ecosystems, business models, and creativity across the enterprise and residential markets in every industry.

While industry conversations revolve around these new services, we should not dismiss the fundamental role that the IP network plays in delivering them. The step to make your IP transport network ready for 5G requires some thorough analysis. Don’t think of it as simply one more network upgrade—5G brings new demands on your transport network that necessitates new capabilities.

Building a 5G IP transport network with the right attributes will be a strategic asset for service providers as services evolve over the next decade. Let me expand on a few of these critical attributes that leading 5G transport networks need to provide.

Convergence

The days are gone when service providers rolled out multiple transport networks to support different services. A modern transport network is converged and capable of concurrently supporting:

Fixed and mobile consumer broadband

Enterprise, small and medium businesses

Retail and wholesale business models

Real-time immersive experiences

IoT connectivity and value-add

To deal with the complexity of transporting multiple services over a converged network, it is essential to simplify the underlay network across network domains. In just a few years, Segment Routing has emerged as the foundational technology to make networks simpler, as it removes protocols (e.g., LDP, RSVP-TE) and becomes more scalable. By 2019, 60% of the top service providers in the world will deploy segment routing in their networks. This frees up the network from maintaining per-flow states while Segment Routing powers a unified xHaul network fabric.

As some legacy RAN protocols (e.g., CPRI) may never go away, the packet-based transport network must also be able to encapsulate and transport them in order to support any fronthaul RAN, midhaul RAN, and backhaul architectures.

Flexibility

With convergence comes the need for flexibility. The transport network must support a wide range of requirements as not every application is the same – some are latency-sensitive, while others are bandwidth-hungry and do not have the same requirements vis-à-vis the network.

Network slicing turns out to be the technology of choice to custom fit 5G networks to specific applications (e.g., allocate a piece of an operator’s mobile network for different use cases, subscriber services, and classes of customers).

At the transport level, Segment Routing traffic engineering capabilities help to instantiate these network slices by making multiple optimizations of the same physical network infrastructure along various dimensions possible—one can be optimized for low-latency, a second one for bandwidth, and a third can offer disjoint paths on two distinct planes.

At the service level, Ethernet VPN, capable of delivering Layer 2 as well as Layer 3 VPN services, helps to enable network slices and offers a unique control plane extending from Access through Edge to WAN, bringing further simplification.

Another important driver for flexibility is the ability to implement network delivered services in distributed locations that are closer to the end user. The goal here is to improve service experience while reducing the load on the transport infrastructure and minimizing the blast radius of any possible failures. Network-oriented edge sites—where virtualized network service functions, content infrastructure, and user applications are deployed using commercial off-the-shelf equipment—are expected to proliferate. This creates a strong dependency between the transport infrastructure and these distributed edge sites, and it is important that the control and data planes get closely coordinated to allow end-to-end services to be built in a seamless fashion.

Timing

Timing and synchronization are of the essence in 5G mobile architectures. If not properly handled, mobile network efficiency and reliability can be impacted greatly, leading to unhappy customers that suffer from a really poor user experience.

A successful strategy combines located time sources, such as GPS, and a well-designed network to carry frequency and time through a combination of Synchronous Ethernet and Precision Time Protocol (PTPv2 or IEEE 1588).

With increasing radio density and expanding in-building coverage, it is becoming more and more difficult, and expensive, to deploy GPS receivers, especially in more challenging locations. Therefore, the ability to deliver time over the transport network will be an essential component of 5G xHaul.

Automation

With increase in network size, the span across multiple network domains, and the high volume of xHaul network configuration changes put automation front and center to a successful 5G implementation.

At the device level, the ability to program using YANG data models—model-driven configuration—with highly performant communication protocols (NETCONF, gRPC, …) has been widely embraced by the industry and is starting to spill over into organizations such as xRAN. A similar model-driven paradigm is being used to extract operational data at very high-frequency—model-driven telemetry—to get real-time visibility of the xHaul infrastructure.

At the network level, it is important to have the capability to orchestrate, manage, and automate the network and its services. Cisco provides comprehensive lifecycle automation to let you operate multiple components/resources—IP transport, network edge sites with virtualized functions, and mobile core—all components of a 5G network slice.

With an unprecedented surge in the number of devices getting connected to the network, the attack surface is getting bigger. The network must be secure, and security begins from being able to trust each system which requires continuous innovation and verification.

With largely expanded 5G networks, most aggregation devices will be placed in untrusted or partially trusted environments, it becomes imperative to quickly detect potential breaches and compromises within the network infrastructure.

The foundation of a trusted network is trusted devices, and all trust must begin in hardware. With hardware-rooted secure boot infrastructure, Cisco platforms provide strong protection against firmware and operating system compromises. This, coupled with advanced runtime OS, control-plane, data-plane, and user-plane protection, allows Cisco platforms unique capabilities to establish and maintain trust in exposed environments.

All these capabilities are critical to make your transport network ready to support and deliver the upcoming wave of 5G services.

Cisco is ready today and committed to providing an xHaul network that is agnostic to the radio provider, while enabling CapEx/OpEx savings as well as new revenue streams via the tenets of convergence, service flexibility, trust, automation, and open standards-based networking. More than 25 tier-1 service providers around the globe have deployed Cisco IP networking capabilities in their mobile xHaul network with many new wins in the last 12 months.

If you want to learn more about Cisco 5G xHaul transport solution, here is a list of great resources:

The rollout of 5G brings with it more possibilities: new services, more speed, more opportunities to scale, and accelerating growth. However, it also brings more complexity overlaid to today’s already-complicated networks.

With growth, the level of operations becomes increasingly difficult with new software demands and multiple tools managing ever-changing technologies. As a result, new operations models are required to succeed in this environment.

Automation is not enough… that’s why global service providers are starting to leverage Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) that embed Analytics, Automation, Big Data, and Security to change the customer experience.

Vodafone-Netherlands (Ziggo) announced that they are taking their RAN automation to the next level and are building the required capabilities toward automation in the 5G Era with the commercial implementation of Cisco SONFlex.

How Vodafone-Netherlands Ziggo uses SONFlex

Vodafone-Netherlands has leveraged the SONFlex platform to implement new Automation use cases quickly. Internally they are building a funnel of ideas, prioritizing them according to business justification, implementing and validating them in a matter of days/weeks.

SONFlex enables Vodafone-Netherlands to accelerate the process of automating a RAN use case from research, to deployment from months to weeks. The ease and flexibility that SONFlex provides has helped to open the possibilities encouraging everyone to work together and share new ideas on ways to automate new service use cases for their customers. The additional value of this outcome will be demonstrated in the future network benchmarks.

Raising the Bar for RAN Automation

Creating new SON applications for specific service requirements requires long hours of planning, programing and testing with radio engineers and programmers before actual implementation. Cisco SONFlex changes that model. SONFlex comes with a library of existing SON modules that can be quickly deployed. You can also create your own custom SON modules with an easy to use, drag-and-drop graphic user interface (GUI) called SONFlex Studio. With the SONFlex Studio radio engineers can tap into their own ideas and create their own SON applications without programming skills. Additionally, SONFlex makes it easy to test, modify and avoid any risk of conflicts with other SON applications. New SON applications can go from “idea” to implementation in minutes or hours (rather than weeks and months). And any application your team developed can be shared between each other.

Of course, you still get all of the Cisco SON closed-loop platform automation platform that runs on any RAN vendor and will continue to function seamlessly even when a new OSS is released (multi-vendor, multi-technology).

All these advanced automation capabilities become even more valuable as Vodafone-Netherlands rolls out their 5G network. 5G will add new technologies, new layers of complexities and introduce new opportunities – if your network automation is ready to take advantage of them. With Cisco SONFlex and SONFlex Studio, Vodafone-Netherlands is one of our customers taking the vision forward and defining new standards of excellence in RAN automation and connected experiences for their customers. They are another amazing story of our product evolution toward the 5G

A couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, I felt like a member of a film crew watching my movie win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Verizon, the Cisco partner I’ve worked with for years, was named 2018 Global Service Provider of the Year. They then won a second honor: Enterprise Partner of the Year for their growth in Enterprise Routing. These awards came in addition to Verizon being named 2018 Marketing Innovation Partner of the Year at Cisco’s Marketing Velocity event in Barcelona.

The Cisco and Verizon partnership serves as a best practices template for our service provider as a channel (SPaaCH) strategy globally.

Marketing Support for a Leading-Edge Strategy

Cisco’s partnership with Verizon, the largest telecom provider in the United States, has become incredibly successful and strategic for both companies over many years. Our Verizon business is growing at a rate of 25% and it’s a solid relationship, aligned from sales to marketing to the executive level.

In November, Verizon announced its strategy “to optimize growth opportunities in the 5G era.” The 5G push to further wireless enterprise services dovetails with the company’s intelligent edge network focus, which was already well underway in 2018. It’s all about reducing cost to market, time to market, and network operations through automation and enhancing reliability with cloud features.

To further this strategy, Cisco partnered with Verizon on an array of Cisco-supported managed cloud service offerings for SD-WAN, security, AppDynamics, and collaboration.

Jointly Branded Campaigns

Over the years, Cisco has partnered closely with the direct sales team to gain a broad and deep understanding of Verizon’s business strategy. The company is evolving beyond its carrier business to one that is focused on the strength of the 5G network. To do so at a time of declining wireless revenues, CapEx budget reductions, and churn from the wireline business, Verizon as an enterprise needs to automate and virtualize more of its infrastructure to increase agility.

We’ve worked to position Cisco as a strategic partner that Verizon can turn to in this transition, not just a hardware vendor. Cisco marketing efforts are designed to build this new perception. The 360-degree marketing plan for 2019 will include support for our go to market efforts and support the Cisco Direct Team with automation, segment routing, and 5G marketing initiatives.

The digital campaign for SD-WAN alone generated 125,000 social impressions and 200,000 direct mail drops. It resulted in 18 wins, bookings of $3.8 million, and an active funnel of $96.3 million.

Cisco Days, Webinars, and More

Kicking off Cisco’s FY19, teams executed five Cisco Days for Verizon Wireless and Verizon Enterprise operations, maintenance, and engineering personnel between August and November. The events focused on optical, automation, 5G, and mobility, and generated $70 million in sales qualified leads. Eight more Cisco Days are planned for 2019.

Also planned in 2019 are eight webinars a month targeted to key Verizon stakeholders. The webinars will be presented by the Cisco Knowledge Network team to increase awareness of the Cisco Bridge to Possible campaign. Topics will include 5G, Automation, and Network Infrastructure. Cisco’s Social Ambassador program, which provides thought leadership and industry news to Verizon stakeholders through social media, will train 80 internal Cisco sales staff to promote 5G, automation, and network infrastructure initiatives as well.

Solid Results

After a solid year in the books (with three prestigious awards to boot!), I look forward to the year ahead, to the relationships built with Verizon, and to taking home more Academy Awards.

Touch — one of the 5 senses that humans are blessed to possess. And it’s the most important, in my opinion. Touch gives us a deeper understanding of the beings/things we are feeling, which cannot be fully experienced by sight, smell, hearing or taste.

As children, we learn of the world through our touch. I see my 8-month-old using touch to guide her experiences. The toys that have more texture get a little more play time. The soft blanket gets extra snuggles of comfort while the water-dipped cold towel to wipe her chin after dinner is generally brushed away rudely. Feedback from touch is what guides us with our actions.

Today, virtually every facet of our daily lives is influenced by technology. Innovative technologies offer more immersive experiences like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) (and both are growing at a phenomenal rate). The Cisco Visual Networking Index forecasts that globally, AR/VR traffic will increase 12-fold between 2017 and 2022 (65.3% CAGR). To put this in perspective, 1.3% of all entertainment traffic (Internet video and gaming) in 2022, will be from augmented and virtual reality up from 0.2% in 2017.

While VR immerses users in a simulated environment, AR is an overlay of technology on the real world. Mixed Reality, a more popular form of AR, has a much higher degree of complexity and is much more realistic. It combines the use of several types of technologies including sensors, advanced optics, et al. bundled into a single device that provides the capability to overlay augmented holographic digital content into your real-time space. This “digital mash-up” creates realistic scenarios stimulating all but the sense of touch. With the advancement of Haptic technology, the touch barrier can now be scaled (to a degree).

There is real-time feedback from the simulated immersive environment that can prompt a human response. If you are in a gaming environment, the touch of the digital rocks that you may be climbing to get to your goal or the application of pressure from your feet to get your virtual horse to canter will enhance the simulated experience. But there are multiple real-life applications as well. A doctor conducting surgery miles away from the patient will get feedback from this haptic technology as they mend a muscle, bone or ligament and can alter their plan almost instantly as the medical situation changes for the patient.

This entire experience of haptic feedback in an immersive environment depends on the quality of connectivity (or network performance), which can provide “real-time feedback” (defined as less than 1 millisecond to be precise). The key enablers are ultra-low latency and high reliability secure networks or the “Tactile Internet” and 5th Generation Mobile Networks (5G). The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) defines the Tactile Internet as an internet network that combines ultra-low latency with extremely high availability, reliability and security and the Tactile Internet represents a “revolutionary level of development for society, economics and culture”. 5G networks are “expected to deliver more speed and capacity to support massive machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and to provide low-latency, high-reliability service for time-critical applications” according to ITU.

As 5G networks begin to be deployed globally and the “Tactile/Haptic Internet” begins to become a reality, most of the advanced M2M or IoT applications will begin to be realized with the amalgamation of sensors and haptic feedback. According to the Cisco Visual Networking Index forecast, M2M modules will be 51% of total devices and connections by 2022 (so the digital foundation is taking shape).

According to Gerhard Fettweis, Creator of the Tactile Internet-“For the tactile Internet, we’ll need more powerful devices and a much faster wireless network, 100 times faster than the current 4G. The 5G latency rate is expected to be less than 1 millisecond; 4G networks have a latency of 25 milliseconds. Once there’s a ubiquitous infrastructure with which we can control real and virtual objects, planet Earth will be changed big-time. 5G will deliver more realistic, immersive, and interactive VR experiences than do today’s systems. Headsets will be mobile, and not plugged into computers. Students will be able to virtually wander the streets of, say, ancient Rome, touching its famous landmarks.”

The deployment of 5G and the dawn of the tactile/haptic internet will be the bridge to possible Virtual and Augmented reality applications that have the potential to enhance the way we “Live, Work, Play and Learn.”